Related Experiment Video
Updated: May 5, 2026

Direct Imaging of Laser-driven Ultrafast Molecular Rotation
Published on: February 4, 2017
New Probe of Cosmic Birefringence Using Galaxy Polarization and Shapes
Weichen Winston Yin1, Liang Dai1, Junwu Huang2
1University of California, Department of Physics, 366 Physics North MC 7300, Berkeley, California 94720, USA.
Abstract:
We propose a novel statistical method to measure cosmic birefringence and demonstrate its power in probing parity violation due to axions. Exploiting an empirical correlation between the integrated radio polarization direction of a spiral galaxy and its apparent shape, we devise an unbiased minimum-variance estimator for the rotation angle, which should achieve an uncertainty of 5°-15° per galaxy. Large galaxy samples from the forthcoming SKA continuum surveys, together with optical shape catalogs, promise a comparable or even lower noise power spectrum for the rotation angle than in the CMB Stage-IV (CMB-S4) experiment, with different systematics.
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